Senators Joe Lieberman (ID-Conn.) and Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) on Tuesday
introduced the Skilled Worker Immigration and Fairness Act of 2007, a H1-B
visa reform bill that would retroactively increase the cap to 115,000 in
2007, and would add a flexible adjustment mechanism that would allow the
cap to be raised to as many as 180,000 visas, depending on market
conditions. In April, the 2008 allotment of 85,000 H1-B visas was consumed
in only one day. "To remain competitive, American companies need access to
highly educated individuals," Lieberman said in a statement. "But today's
system makes it difficult for innovative employers to recruit and retain
highly educated talent, which puts the U.S. at a competitive disadvantage
globally." The bill also contains measures to improve H1-B visa fraud
prevention and enforcement, including prohibiting employers from
advertising jobs as being exclusively open to H1-B visa holders. The bill
also raises the H1-B petition fee by $500 to pay for enhanced enforcement
and ensure the program is self sustaining. The bill would also exempt
foreign nationals who hold U.S. graduate degrees or non-U.S. graduate
degrees in science, technology, engineering or math. Earlier this year,
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates told a Senate panel it is unsound policy to
restrict foreign-born, U.S. college graduates from working in the United
States. "It makes no sense to tell well-trained, highly skilled
individuals, many of whom are educated at our top universities, that they
are not welcome here," Gates said. "We have to welcome the great minds of
this world, not shut them out of our country."Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

The lack of women in technology related fields is typically blamed on a
lack of women interested in pursuing computers and engineering, but the
experience of women working in such fields is rarely discussed. The "Women
in Technology 2007" report, published by Women in Technology International,
finds that the vast majority of women working in their field enjoy their
jobs, and that of the 2,000 female respondents, 75 percent would encourage
other women to pursue similar interests. However, the report found that
many female tech workers have mixed feelings about their companies'
climates. Only 52 percent of women believed their company offers a
favorable environment for women. "There is a kind of conventional wisdom
that goes around that maybe women don't like technology. So, for us to
learn through this research that they do like it and do find it to be a
place where they can make a difference and would go as far as to recommend
it to others is very telling," said Compel President and report co-author
Patricia Schaefer. "What was very intriguing was that such a large
percentage of women said that they didn't find their organizational
climates to be very inviting to women. They're saying that they don't feel
that their voices are heard and it causes them to question whether this is
an environment that they wish to stay in." Almost half of respondents, 48
percent, felt that their views were not as acknowledged or welcomed as
those of their male counterparts, and 44 percent said that women in their
company were given fewer opportunities to participate in and lead large
projects. While the majority of female tech workers, 73 percent, felt that
they could influence their bosses, only 53 percent described themselves as
broadly influential in the organization, and only a little over half of
respondents said they felt in charge of their careers.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

A variant of the infamous SQL Slammer Worm struck the computer database
infrastructure of Florida's Sarasota County on Oct. 23, 2006, and crippled
the network by overwriting the system's administrative password. Oct. 23
was the day people voted early on the U.S. House race in the state's 13th
Congressional district between Vern Buchanan (R) and Christine Jennings
(D); the Republican candidate was ultimately declared the winner, but the
electoral outcome has been contested, and questions about the worm's
possible impact on the results--and the disclosure or non-disclosure of the
incident to the parties challenging the election--remain. An incident
report filed by Sarasota County reported that the worm infected a server on
the county's database system, which then "sent traffic to other database
servers on the Internet, and the traffic generated by the infected server
rendered the firewall unavailable." The report indicated that the server
had never been patched for Slammer, and its operation during the election
was something of an embarrassment because the machine was slated to be
decommissioned, according to Suncoast Technology Center information
security analyst Hal Logan. The manufacturer of the touchscreen voting
systems used in Sarasota issued a bug warning that the county ignored, and
submitted a series of stipulations to the county before its release of the
source code to a panel of computer scientists organized to probe the
incredibly high number of undervotes recorded on the touchscreen machines
in the District 13 congressional election in Sarasota. Both documents were
withheld from the legal counsel representing the election's challengers by
the Sarasota Election Supervisors office. Logan admitted to the
possibility that a worm could be used to hack into the voting system, but
strongly doubted that the Oct. 23 attack would have been successful had
that been the goal. "Our network doesn't share copper or wire with the
Supervisor of Elections' network," he explained.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab has unveiled
Scratch, a free programming tool for both Windows and the Macintosh aimed
primarily at children that enables users to blend images, sound, and video
to create their own animated stories, video games, and interactive artwork.
Scratch requires no prior knowledge of computer languages and uses a
simple graphical interface that allows programs to be assembled like
building blocks. MIT professor Mitchel Resnick, one of the researchers at
the Lifelong Kindergarten group and the inventor of Lego Mindstorms, says
Scratch is a new, more accessible type of programming language that doesn't
require technical expertise or experience. Objects and characters can be
selected from a menu, created in a paint editor, or cut and pasted off the
Web, and animated by snapping together different "action" blocks into
stacks. "They don't have to worry about the obscure punctuation and syntax
common in most programming languages," Resnick says. Scratch is inspired
by the way DJs use other people's music to create new sounds. "We want
people to start from existing materials--grabbing an image, grabbing some
sound, maybe even bits of someone else's program and then extending them
and mixing them to make them their own," Resnick says. British Computer
Society President Nigel Shadbolt, a professor at the University of
Southampton, says Scratch provides a good introduction to computational
thinking and could inspire the next generation of computing
professionals.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

University of South Carolina's computing department chairman Duncan Buell
said South Carolina students are turning down lucrative salaries by not
studying computing, one of the highest-paying and most in-demand degrees
for new college graduates. Enrollment in computing studies at USC has
dropped 61 percent over six years, from 688 undergraduates in 2000 to 265
in 2006. Clemson University has seen undergraduate enrollment in computing
studies shrink by 42 percent, from 796 in 2000 to 466 in 2006. Meanwhile,
demand for computer science graduates is extremely high. The American
Electronics Association says the U.S. technology industry added 150,000
jobs in 2006, and new college graduates with a computing degree can earn
about $52,000 a year. Buell said he is fighting the myth that America is
outsourcing all of its high-tech jobs, and that he hopes to see enrollment
rebound to about 500 students. Buell said there is $50 billion in
computing salaries available in the United States, and while many
lower-level programming jobs have been outsourced to low wage countries
such as India, demand for people with bachelor's degrees has been growing
in recent years. Buell said most of the new jobs for people with computing
degrees are in information management, and while fewer in number, people
with a knowledge of scientific computing are in high demand. Buell also
said that high school guidance materials and courses do not adequately
prepare students entering college-level computer studies. To attract more
students to computer studies, USC is hosting two one-week camps for high
school students, one in games programming and one in media computing and
animation.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

A project funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
will bring together computer scientists and cultural heritage researchers
to assess if today's increasingly advanced 3D computer technology could be
combined with the most recent historical evidence to create significantly
improved visual reconstructions of churches, palaces, and other ancient
sites. The collaborative project could help historians, students, and
museum visitors gain a better perspective on how such sites were perceived
and used by the people who inhabited them in the past. Brighter, more
vivid color and better contrast between light and dark areas can be used to
create a much more realistic simulation, which could provide better insight
as to how people lived in such spaces. Another benefit of creating
computer reconstructions is that they are less expensive than physical
models, and it is far easier to store and update the data than it is to
transport and change the physical model. These techniques could be used,
for example, to conduct a chemical analysis of an ancient lamp to determine
the type of fuel used, which could then be used to determine what type and
how much smoke would have been produced, the amount of light in the space,
and how objects would have looked under the light. This information could
then be incorporated into the computer-generated simulation of the site,
perhaps creating a different perception of how the space appeared. Within
a few years, these techniques being assessed could provide the basis for 3D
computer displays in museums that show how artifacts would have appeared in
their original settings. The project is being conducted by researchers
from the Warwick Manufacturing Group and the new Warwick Digital Laboratory
at the University of Warwick.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

In an interview, director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial
Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and iRobot co-founder Rodney Brooks discusses how
robotics technology will advance in the coming years, and what
breakthroughs are needed for real-world science to realize technologies
that currently exist only in the realm of science fiction. He says the gap
between reality and fiction in robotics stems from a misappraisal of how
certain things function, which gives rise to unrealistic ambitions for AI.
Brooks lists four objectives that scientists and engineers must achieve
before an artificially intelligent and affordable major-domo can be
created: Robots must be imbued with a two-year-old child's object
recognition skills, a four-year-old's comprehension of language, a
six-year-old's manual dexterity, and an eight-year-old's social
understanding. The CSAIL director foresees a gradual ceding of control of
automobiles to automated systems, noting that automakers are laying the
groundwork for this trend by adding assistive technologies to their
products. He says the most interesting work being undertaken in robotics,
as far as the military is concerned, is making the machines rugged enough
to withstand abuse, while the concentration in household robotics is on
delivering satisfactory performance at an affordable price, which relates
directly to the four challenges Brooks outlines. He thinks robots will
become very popular for dangerous, drudgery-heavy jobs such as mining, as
well as complex tasks that require exacting precision and control, such as
brain surgery. Brooks posits that people are already surrounded by such
cool AI applications as search algorithms and statistical machine learning,
and he believes robotics will change people's expectations of their
world.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Toronto-based computer design-interface guru and Microsoft researcher Bill
Buxton, speaking at the International World Wide Web Conference, predicted
that a more versatile user interface will arrive sooner rather than later
to replace the mouse and the keyboard. Buxton said the reason the mouse
has lasted as long as it has is because it was an excellent idea when it
was first invented in the mid 1980s. "It's a good example of how the
better the idea, the more difficult it is to displace," Buxton said.
Creating a new interface is not about replacing the mouse, according to
Buxton, but creating a new tool that complements it. Buxton said Microsoft
is developing the idea of interactive surfaces, where a computer can be a
desk or wall or window. "As soon as you start getting larger surfaces, you
start noticing you have four fingers and a thumb," Buxton said. "I can put
10 points on the screen and grasp and move them with gestures." Buxton
said the current Graphical User Interface is based around using a single
point, adding, "You have the gesture vocabulary of a fruit fly."Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Stanford University computer science Ph.D. graduate student Tal Garfinkel
is a program chair for the First Usenix Workshop on Offensive Technologies
(WOOT), which takes place in Boston on Aug. 6. Garfinkel says the term
"offensive technologies" applies to developers researching and
understanding techniques for exploiting software weaknesses, reverse
engineering, information gathering, evading detection, and similar
activities. By understanding both offensive technologies and traditional
defensive strategies such as intrusion detection, access control, and bug
detection and prevention, one better understands computer security.
Garfinkel says many computer experts read "black hat" magazines and the
code used in attack tools. The problem is that the editorial quality of
offensive technology journals is often low and with little peer review and
the veracity of claims in such media are often questionable. This lack of
quality writing on offensive technologies is a major reason for the WOOT
conference, where people with different backgrounds and experiences with
attack technologies can share their knowledge and expertise. Garfinkel
says future malware will target high value targets such as business
intelligence and intellectual property that can be sold offshore where
litigation and enforcement could be a challenge. Garfinkel also says the
"Wild West atmosphere" of massive amounts of botnets everywhere is bound to
give out at some point, and that the most important thing people can do is
to influence CIOs and others purchasing programs to put pressure on vendors
to build more secure products.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Accenture Technology Labs spends an average of $250 million a year at its
four research labs trying to figure out how businesses can work better.
Luke Hughes, director of research at Accenture's Palo Alto, Calif., lab,
said over the next five years, Accenture will focus on eight significant
business technology trends: virtualized infrastructure; seamless IT
interoperability; process-centric (modular); closed-loop analytics; fluid
collaboration platforms; Web 2.0 as a mass participation platform;
mobility; and industrialized software development. Hughes said a more
immediate project his researchers are working on is the Business Event
Advisor, a program that attempts to automatically answer business
intelligence questions by translating news events into actionable
information using limited computer intelligence. For example, the
resignation of a supplier's CFO might indicate looming financial trouble
for that supplier, indicating there may need to be a change in supply
arrangements, or a competitor's recall may provide an opportunity to
capitalize on their predicted lost revenue. Hughes expects the system to
be on the market in three years because, while the technology is available
today, the specific data modeling must be made for each industry segment
and text analytics is still maturing. Among Accenture's other projects is
the Virtual Corridor, a twist on traditional videoconferencing, where
instead of scheduled videoconferences in a meeting room, an always-on
camera system links to locations, encouraging impromptu collaboration.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Marquette University assistant philosophy professor Keith A. Bauer
questions where humans will draw the line when it comes to how far will we
allow technology to change our lives and our bodies. In the paper "Wired
Patients," due to be published this year in the Cambridge Quarterly of
Healthcare Ethics, Bauer describes a possible future where children are
genetically engineered to be smarter and well behaved, adults will live 20
years longer than today, wireless links connect our brains to email
transmitters, and humans are given biological upgrades such as night
vision. While these predictions are in the future, current technology is
not that far behind. Already, about 200 Americans have received an implant
called the VeriChip that stores medical information that can be retrieved
by a doctor with a scanner. Other technologies described in the paper
include electrodes that can be implanted into patients brains to help them
regain functions lost to strokes and spinal cord injuries, implantable
heart monitors that can collect information at home and send it to a doctor
in the hospital, artificial hearts that prolong life, and so-called bionic
limbs that replace those lost through war or an accident. Meanwhile, many
Americans are unaware of the debate over transhumanism, a movement that
supports using new technology to expand the capabilities of the human mind
and body. Supporters believe that humans have always desired to improve
the human species and that not utilizing technology to do so is admitting
defeat to the slow changes in evolution. Those opposed believe that
redesigning ourselves and our children will widen the gap between the
privileged and the underprivileged, changing the lives of future
generations and assuming God-like powers. Bauer expressed his concern that
these modification may not only change ourselves, but will alter the
species, and that any government effort to control such technology lags
behind the advancements of science.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

University of Toronto computer science professor Karan Singh has developed
graphics software that could radically transform the architecture,
engineering, and construction industry by allowing drafters to create
three-dimensional, computer-aided renderings in a matter of minutes,
instead of days as with traditional computer-aided drafting. The software
could not only accelerate the design and drafting process, but reduce
building errors and allow for more accurate budget planning as well. Paul
Teicholz, a consultant and founder of the Center for Integrated Facility
Engineering at Stanford University in Stanford, Calif., said the industry
is ready for a major change, as productivity in the construction industry
has dropped at an average compound rate of .6 percent over the past 40
years. By comparison, other industries saw their productivity increase by
almost 2 percent over the same period. The new software could help shorten
the architectural phase of a project, says Sketch2 Corp. CEO Colin Graham.
The software could eliminate the need for drafters to redo work the
architect did in another medium, and allow architects to create renderings
themselves. The software enables users to use a stylus on a computer
screen, much like a pen on paper. The software starts with a blank floor
plan, and the user tells the program what type of room to make and can then
start sketching components of the space using the stylus. The program
recognizes patterns, such as a line for a wall, and suggests materials such
as brick or drywall. Then the designer can add furniture from a database
of office products. Graham predicts the program could provide savings in
construction costs of 25 to 30 percent, largely due to a more efficient
system in which architects and designers focus on creating better and more
cost-effective designs.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie said
Microsoft is researching multiple opportunities to bring computing into
every aspect of people's lives and improve the way people communicate. For
example, to improve health care Microsoft is experimenting with optical
recognition technology that can help people ensure they are taking the
correct medication at the correct time. Optical recognition software could
also be used to increase the text size of printed mail and documents to
make them easier to read. Microsoft is also developing technology to help
illiterate people perform computing tasks using video and icons, which
could be particularly useful in regions where the majority of people can
only gain access to computing technology through cell phones. Microsoft is
working to make such scenarios possible through its research and its
Unlimited Potential initiative, which recently expanded to include the
Student Innovation Suite software package, which is available to
governments and students in emerging countries round the world for just $3.
Mundie said Microsoft is also working on heterogeneous multicore
processors, but faces challenges in overcoming concurrency and complexity
as systems become far more distributed but also parallel and asynchronous.
"Many new technologies are going to have to be brought forward that are
loosely coupled, asynchronous, concurrent, composable, decentralized and
resilient. A great deal more constructive thinking is going to have to be
done around how we build these systems in the future," Mundie said.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Salon.com founder and "Dreaming in Code" author Scott Rosenberg discusses
successful software development in an interview, using insights derived
from the problems encountered by Mitch Kapor's Chandler project to create
an open source alternative to Microsoft Outlook. In Rosenberg's opinion,
Chandler's problems did not necessarily stem from too many engineers
struggling to contribute to its development, but rather from the fact that
the project "was being led by someone who is not primarily a programmer,
whereas open source projects are much more typically driven by
programmers." Rosenberg contends that engineers' constant desire for
specificity is a need that no project can fulfill, which is why
miscommunication between engineers and business people is frequent; the
Salon.com founder says regular communication between these two camps and
close attention to what people are saying can help avoid this problem.
Rosenberg recommends caution when it comes to vocabulary and terminology,
in view of the possibility that programmers and nonprogrammers might not
share the same meanings. He says the Chandler team devoted an excessive
amount of time to the abstract, arguing that "Working from prototypes and
dealing with things that are partially functioning, so that business people
can have something to go on, provides more clarity [than an abstract
product]." Rosenberg says the incremental principle that underlies any
creative act applies to software development, and recommends that projects
should start small with an achievable objective. By studying the Chandler
project's progress, Rosenberg concludes that "the lesson [for open source
developers] is to put out a small piece of a product that is useful enough
to inspire people. Do it earlier, rather than later."Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

It is the job of numerical analysts to ascertain the accuracy and
precision of a computed answer and determine the best way to formulate the
computation to augment these two qualities, while The Portland Group
computer engineer Michael Wolfe writes, "The rest of us address the problem
by going to double precision and hoping for the best." He notes that the
order of computations can be altered and the answers delivered impacted by
a compiler, and observes that the code generation scheme used by compilers
to vectorize summations has remained unchanged for three decades. Wolfe
points out the relative sluggishness of floating point operations, and says
high-performance computing would benefit from a lowering of the multiply
count, the substitution of addition for multiplication, or the replacement
of division by multiplication. The author recalls that IEEE supported an
initiative to standardize on floating point operations in the 1980s, and
all current mainstream processors follow this scheme. Wolfe observes that
performance can also be affected by precision control, noting that
numerical library efforts by Oak Ridge National Labs and the University of
Tennessee utilize the fact that single precision floating point operations
run considerably faster than double precision on numerous contemporary
processors.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

The ubiquitous proliferation of "smart dust"--tiny sensors that can
self-organize into wireless networks--is considered an inevitability by
engineers, but its practical application requires the construction of a
global perspective from the data supplied by all the individual sensors.
Researchers are using topological, or shape-based, methods to address this
challenge and others. "Figuring out the structure of wireless sensor
networks is the kind of problem topology was meant to solve," explains
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign mathematician Robert Ghrist.
Topology differs from geometry in that it considers features and properties
that do not change when a shape is stretched and its geometry warped;
examples include the Euler characteristic and homology, which can solve
many problems associated with wireless networks. With a given sensor
network, mathematicians can examine a theoretical shape called the Rips
complex that diagrams how sensors communicate with each other, and from
this form a picture of which sensors must remain operational in order to
maintain full area coverage, and which sensors can be deactivated. The
homology of a 10,000-sensor network can be computed in less than a second
by a standard laptop, thanks to advances in computer speed and homology
algorithms. Challenges associated with the management of data generated by
sensor networks are also being tackled via topology, an example being the
problem of obtaining an accurate count of objects in a covered area. In
the real world, some objects are counted by more sensors than others, so
topological techniques, particularly those involving the Euler
characteristic, are being tapped to make each object contribute equally to
the total.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

A McKinsey/Sand Hill Group poll of nearly 500 senior IT and business
executives on current and future software trends, expectations, and
spending habits indicates that business owners are demanding the more rapid
rollout of innovative software, with an emphasis on usability and
integration as defining characteristics of innovation. For the first time
in a long while, software costs are not a major issue for companies, while
IT organizations are being more permissive in terms of allowing business
units to invest in smaller, more original software projects. The results
of the survey also show that business users will circumvent the IT
department to fulfill their software needs, if necessary. Respondents
listed the software trends that carry the biggest implications for their
businesses, and the most highly desired products from vendors, in
descending order, as innovation, software as a service, service-oriented
architecture, and open source software. However, 22 percent of respondents
claimed industry innovation is already peaking, while 8 percent argued that
software's innovation high point has come and gone. Sixty-nine percent of
those surveyed reported that their software budgets are centrally
controlled, and 40 percent said business units will have more control over
the budgets in two years' time. A survey author says this shift will be a
boon to small software vendors, and larger software companies must plan
accordingly; 29 percent of polled IT executives thought large vendors can
meet demands for innovation, while only 15 percent of non-IT executives
felt the same way. A shift in the way companies purchase software is
highly probable, with business technology executives expecting around 40
percent of their software business to be paid for via subscription pricing
and other alternatives to traditional licenses over the next few years.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top

Mobiscopes are networked sensing applications that count on multiple
mobile sensors to perform global tasks, and the authors contend that their
emergence is being facilitated by the proliferation of affordable mobile
devices capable of processing and sensing, along with ubiquitous network
connectivity's rapid expansion. By their extension of the traditional
sensor network model, mobiscopes present challenges in data management,
data integrity, privacy, and network system design. There are a number of
existing applications that fall within this category, but they offer
customized one-time solutions to what are basically the same series of
challenges. The authors argue that the time is ripe to consider a general
mobiscope architecture that recognizes common challenges and offers a
systematic process for future mobiscope design. Common requirements for
mobiscope applications include the assurance of data persistence even when
sensing nodes exit the data collection or mobile nodes are absent;
real-time information delivery; consideration of social constraints on
system behavior because the system exploits sensors and mobility sources
already present in the environment; and the consistent applicability of
metadata across networks. Heterogeneity is both an advantage and a
disadvantage of mobiscopes, and heterogeneous sensing systems are resistant
to the vulnerabilities of sensing modalities and even more resilient
against flawed, absent, or malevolent data sources than carefully designed
homogeneous systems. "In general, because future mobiscopes' main goal
will be information distillation from raw data, system designers will need
theoretical foundations for obfuscating the raw data in a way that
reconciles privacy requirements on individual measurements with the ability
to compute certain aggregate properties of the collective," the authors
write. A mobiscope architecture must introduce communication protocol and
data management interfaces, as well as programming interfaces for
in-network computing.Click Here to View Full Articleto the top